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Attitudes like these greatly inflate the actual incidence rate of outright illegal abuse of internet services, most notably child porn. There is not a pedophil

Attitudes like these greatly inflate the actual incidence rate of outright illegal abuse of internet services, most notably child porn. There is not a pedophile lurking for open wifi on every block, as popular hype would have you believe. (By contrast, there often IS a violent domestic abuser lurking on every block in US cities, yet nowhere the same magnitude of public shame campaign directed against them, despite the magnitude of their damage to society.) Also, downloading copyrighted material generally amounts to a civil offense in the US, even though it is often conflated with more serious criminal behavior (aka child porn) by the MAFIAA. The risks of running unsecured wifi can be easily communicated to its users, and likewise contained by promoting use of secondary encryption such as SSL. To claim these risks are so grave that people running unsecured wifi must be idiots is comparable to saying that people who leave their personal cars parked on city streets are also idiots, since those cars be stolen and used in violent crimes.

petercooper 17y ago
There is not a pedophile lurking for open wifi on every block, as popular hype would have you believe. Did I say there was? You wildly missed my point. The point is not that it's common, but that it can happen at all. Someone may use a public connection to download illegal material and that, in today's touchy security environment, could easily lead to the cops hauling your computers away. Simple as that. No paranoia here. This is reality. With a locked down private network, this unlikely event is made way more unlikely. Still, if your business wants to run that risk then, well, you're a "risk taker" by my definition. To claim these risks are so grave that people running unsecured wifi must be idiots is comparable to saying that people who leave their personal cars parked on city streets are also idiots, since those cars be stolen and used in violent crimes. A ridiculous comparison. If someone steals one of your company's van and does a drive by, the cops are hardly going to bust in and take out all your computers as evidence. My post stands.
- westbywest 17y ago
  As does my post, although I'm disappointed in the distribution of karma points on both. Since child porn predates both wifi and the web, wifi encryption is just a band-aid when it's advocated as a solution to distribution of illegal content. People determined to use the broadband connections of others to mask their usage need only google things like 'break wpa encryption' and find adequate means, and they have plenty of incentive to be determined. Which still leaves the unfortunate middle-man with the same scenario of having his computer confiscated, but only now with even less of an idea of how to avoid the same problem in the future. Besides that, my bias is instilled from seeing coffeeshops and similar small businesses inevitably annoy paying customers because of snafus with wifi ecryption, e.g. an older mac laptop that doesn't understand WPA2. My opinion is that this does greater damage than the boogie-men of unsecured wifi will ever do. To again invoke the analogy of car theft, where I live it's considered more sensible to leave your vehicle unlocked and nothing valuable in plain sight than to tint the windows.

petercooper 17y ago

There is not a pedophile lurking for open wifi on every block, as popular hype would have you believe. Did I say there was? You wildly missed my point. The point is not that it's common, but that it can happen at all. Someone may use a public connection to download illegal material and that, in today's touchy security environment, could easily lead to the cops hauling your computers away. Simple as that. No paranoia here. This is reality. With a locked down private network, this unlikely event is made way more unlikely. Still, if your business wants to run that risk then, well, you're a "risk taker" by my definition. To claim these risks are so grave that people running unsecured wifi must be idiots is comparable to saying that people who leave their personal cars parked on city streets are also idiots, since those cars be stolen and used in violent crimes. A ridiculous comparison. If someone steals one of your company's van and does a drive by, the cops are hardly going to bust in and take out all your computers as evidence. My post stands.

westbywest 17y ago
As does my post, although I'm disappointed in the distribution of karma points on both. Since child porn predates both wifi and the web, wifi encryption is just a band-aid when it's advocated as a solution to distribution of illegal content. People determined to use the broadband connections of others to mask their usage need only google things like 'break wpa encryption' and find adequate means, and they have plenty of incentive to be determined. Which still leaves the unfortunate middle-man with the same scenario of having his computer confiscated, but only now with even less of an idea of how to avoid the same problem in the future. Besides that, my bias is instilled from seeing coffeeshops and similar small businesses inevitably annoy paying customers because of snafus with wifi ecryption, e.g. an older mac laptop that doesn't understand WPA2. My opinion is that this does greater damage than the boogie-men of unsecured wifi will ever do. To again invoke the analogy of car theft, where I live it's considered more sensible to leave your vehicle unlocked and nothing valuable in plain sight than to tint the windows.